Reminiscence of Samuel H. Wieand: the NSABP Years

Abstract

I knew Sam Wieand for over 20 years and had the good fortune to have worked with him at the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) for 12 years. Sam has been greatly missed by his colleagues at the NSABP, as we knew he would be. He was a highly accomplished academician, a respected scientific leader, an astute administrator, and a dear friend to those of us who were fortunate to have worked with him in Pittsburgh. There are so many aspects of Sam’s life that are noteworthy that it is difficult to select any one upon which to focus as a means to honor him. In his professional life, Sam’s colleagues recognized him as a renowned statistician and clinical trial scientist. In his personal life, Sam’s friends also admired him as a devoted husband, a loving father and grandfather, and a true friend. Others have described his scientific accomplishments, and I do not want to repeat them here. Instead, I decided that the best way that I could honor Sam in a manner that he would appreciate would be to summarize his activities at the University of Pittsburgh while at the NSABP, and focus on some of his personal attributes and how they contributed to his accomplishments there. Sam began and ended his professional career as a cancer clinical trial biostatistician at the NSABP. He first joined the NSABP as a statistician in the early 1980s and led the statistical work for clinical trials to evaluate treatments for colorectal cancer. He succeeded so well that after only five years he was recruited to the Mayo Clinic where in 1998 he became the director of statistical operations for their portfolio of cancer clinical trials. In 1995, after a productive tenure at the Mayo Clinic, he rejoined the NSABP, this time as the director of the NSABP Biostatistics Center. Sam was recruited by the leadership of the University of Pittsburgh at a time when the NSABP was facing a challenging period in its history. A clinical investigator at a Canadian institution falsified eligibility information submitted to the NSABP Statistical Center for six women